Looking Through the Psychoanalytic Lens -Voter Choices & Election Outcomes: Case illustrations

The Postgraduate Psychoanalytic Society & Institute

Co-sponsoring with MPG consulting

Invite you to our Sunday Dialogue Program

Gene Guberman, LP, MA

3 CE credit hours for Social Workers, Mental Health Counselors, and Licensed Psychoanalysts holding licenses in New York State

What just happened in our nation? Psychoanalyst Gene Guberman will explore some of the challenging issues conflicting our culture as manifested in the psychology of a diverse group of voters. Case vignettes will be used to understand underlying psychodynamic issues & motivations for political choices.Gene distinguishes politics from unwitting psychological factors embedded in politics, examines the nature of perception including unintentional subjectivity, defines psychodynamics and how they influence a voter’s choice. In this presentation case vignettes will illustrate the nature of conscious and unconscious psychological factors influencing political choices.

We are living in an era of significant cultural polarization. Understanding these consuming social divisions calls for examination of the political, economic, social, and media effects to account for the election outcome. Psychoanalysts need to be attentive to the ways in which these broad cultural forces manifest and shape individual psychodynamics as well as how individual psychodynamics may determine an individual’s political activity or lack of it. Using case examples, Gene applies psychoanalytic concepts to illustrate how unconscious processes function within voters to influence their election choices.

Finally, Gene invites us to look within ourselves, to identify with his case vignettes and to reflect on aspects of ourselves that may unknowingly be hidden from us. According to philosophers & psychoanalysts, human nature has been shown to have an inherent self-deceptive feature. In other words, an emotional or irrational side of us that lead to faulty judgments, mistaken political and marital choices, unwanted personal habits, personality traits, and self-destructive actions. Using diverse psychoanalytic concepts and vignettes from his practice, Gene demonstrates how psychological motivations and rationale underlay our election choices.

Learning Objectives:

• Participants will gain an understanding of how social interactions entail mutual unconscious collusions
• Participants will gain broadened insight into unconscious mental processes, including a contemporary view of healthy and pathological compromise formations
• Participants will gain insight into how an exploration of voting choice may provide a window into the function of compromise formation in an individual client’s overall dynamics
• Participants will get an understanding of how childhood dynamics affect our decision-making processes.
• Participants will have the opportunity to reflect on how consonant or opposing political views in a therapeutic couple may shape transference / countertransference phenomena.

Gene Guberman, LP, MA, NCPsyA is a faculty member, and supervisor at the Postgraduate Psychoanalytic Society & Institute (PPSI), and The Institute for Expressive Analysis (IEA); a former director & faculty member of the New York Center for Psychoanalytic Training (NYCPT) where he graduated in 1990, he has been affiliated, taught and supervised at many training institutes and settings, synthesizing modern conflict theories with relational approaches. Gene lectures on topics addressing the values of psychoanalytic clinical theories and techniques. He is a former editor of the Journal, Issues in Psychoanalytic Psychology at Washington Square Institute. Gene was a former Board Trustee as Secretary, National Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis (NAAP).